Project Description: “Children of Misfortune: Young and Poor in Early New England, 1675-1820”

“Children of Misfortune” tells an unusual story of early New England by reconstructing the lives

of Boston poor apprentices, children whom Boston authorities moved out of problem families and into

more respectable ones. Poor apprenticeship, widely used by English and American magistrates in the

study period, was similar to other kinds of apprenticeship, in that adults moved children from one

household to another within a network of family and community relationships in order to train children

for the future. But poor apprenticeship differed in that it showed how local magistrates dealt with those

who lived outside known and trusted networks. Magistrates intervened when they believed parents could

not provide a proper environment for children because of illegitimacy, abject poverty, parental neglect,

desertion, or death. Officials bound out as poor apprentices those children they perceived as being at risk

yet capable of useful labor. In poor apprenticeship, magistrates removed children from the networks

established by poor people and placed them in households that were part of the magistrates’ established

networks. These households could be trusted to share magistrates’ views about ordering society and

training poor children for a laboring life.

The lives of Boston’s poor apprentices reveal the vitality of family and community networks

across New England in the study period. People were on the move, migrating into and out of Boston,

from one New England town to another, and from one state to another, in search of better opportunities.

In every community, poor people developed their own networks, often out of sight and barely recognized

by local officials, even though their labor was integral to maintaining the households, farms, and shops of

more prosperous residents. In early Massachusetts, these more prosperous people might live one hundred

miles apart, but they knew each other, or knew about each other, through family, church, commercial, and

political activities. Boston officials had kin, friends, and business contacts well beyond Boston: they

knew the “better sort” of people in Cape Cod, Salem, Worcester, Springfield, and beyond. By following

poor children on their journeys from one family to another, we can see these networks in operation. A

poor child orphaned in Boston might move through several households of parental kin and neighbors

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before local authorities intervened and moved the child into a family that authorities knew. This host

family, by taking in and raising the poor apprentice, affirmed their connection to Boston officials and

strengthened the network of respectable people who would raise a child in proper manner. The host

family members were usually complete strangers to the child, but the child quickly became part of this

new network.

Poor apprenticeship shows that a “proper” family was not the traditional nuclear household that

many imagine to be the norm in early America. Poor parents knew authorities might take away their

children for a variety of reasons, and some struggling parents surrendered their sons and daughters

willingly, accepting family fragmentation in the hope that their children would have a better future.

Boston magistrates bound out several thousand poor children in the 1700s; local magistrates in other New

England towns bound out thousands more. Breaking up households of the poor and expanding

households of the more prosperous was commonplace. Officials and the “better sort” routinely included

poor apprentices in their households, along with craft apprentices, adult servants, and slaves. Poor

apprenticeship redistributed children and their labor. Children from the margins of society grew up as

servants in families that stood at the center or sometimes the very top of the social hierarchy.

Poor apprenticeship shows that, in this early period, a child’s labor was valuable. These bound

children had survived the diseases that killed many young people in early America. Sometimes the only

ones remaining in what had been families of five or six, these children brought useful and economically

meaningful labor to the new households in which they were placed. The poor apprenticeship contract

dictated that the master provide the necessities of life, manual labor training, and basic literacy education;

at the end of the contract, the master usually provided two outfits of clothing. In return, the child was

bound to live with and labor for the master until legal adulthood, often a matter of ten or fifteen years.

“Children of Misfortune” documents these children’s experiences and shows their limited agency

in surviving family misfortune, intervention of authorities, and relocation and reeducation in approved

households. While some parents maintained contact with their sons and daughters, most poor apprentices

built completely new lives based on their masters’ (not their parents’) social networks. Not surprisingly,

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most poor apprentices ended up in situations that authorities would have considered appropriate: doing

useful manual labor of husbandry or housewifery, serving their betters as servants or laborers, dependent

on the networks of the family that had brought them to adulthood. They had taken what officials

considered their proper place in a hierarchical society.

“Children of Misfortune” reconstructs the lives of about 100 poor apprentices bound out by

Boston officials. Each narrative gives a fresh perspective to early New England history, placing well-

known events within the intimate context of a poor child’s life. An orphaned boy partially disabled by

smallpox in 1760 served in the Continental Army for three years and afterwards lived a long life as a

shoemaker in Hatfield. A poor girl bound to a Revolutionary leader in Hardwick married the illegitimate

son of a wealthy business owner in a neighboring community. An enterprising boy successfully left his

master in Boston in 1798 to join the crew of the new U.S.S. Constitution. A boy born in the Boston

Almshouse in 1799 and bound to a master in Barnstable became so embedded in his host community that

he married into a prominent family and erected a poetic headstone for his wife upon her death. Other

stories ring with more grief than joy. Indian children were bound out as pillage after King Philip’s War in

1676. A twelve-year-old “Negro” girl, bound to a married couple who had been slaves until the

Revolutionary War, was abruptly removed from her foster mother’s care when the husband died, as

magistrates considered a widowed former slave woman to be an inappropriate master. A former

apprentice who bought land, built a house, and married, died in 1800 less than two months after his

marriage when a tree he was chopping down fell on him. The lives of these and other children show the

range of human experience: trouble and happiness, prejudice and respect, bad fortune and good fortune.

The humanities disciplines are under pressure to demonstrate their relevance to a public that is

increasingly skeptical about their usefulness. If the humanities have value, then humanities scholars

should be able to describe that value. Real human stories communicate that value by illuminating our

past and broadening its landscape to include those that have been on the margins. The narratives in

“Children of Misfortune” show the outlines of a different early America: one where poverty was

common, where children were taken from their parents, where children moved into new homes within the

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networks fashioned by local officials. As popular organizations like ancestry.com and television shows

about family roots demonstrate, Americans are hungry to find people in the past with whom they can

identify—not famous forefathers, whose biographies have dominated the literature, but people like

themselves who lived in family situations that are still familiar today.

The narratives in this book trace poor apprentices upstream towards their births and downstream

into adulthood. I began with the paper contracts (apprenticeship indentures) by which children were

bound to masters. I connected these contracts to related documents, such as vitals, land evidence, and tax

records. I selected these children because I could find sources with additional information, because they

illustrate the wide variety of households that caused official concern, and because they show the range of

“proper” households within magistrates’ networks. The records documenting the lives of these poor

apprentices are not conveniently gathered in one archive, or even a dozen archives. Reconstructing their

lives involves many hours of searching for scraps of evidence in many different places.

Because the direct evidence about Boston’s poor apprentices is scanty, I have also searched for

records related to the adults who redirected the lives of these children: the masters with whom the

apprentices lived, and the overseers of the poor who decided which children to bind out and which

households to bind them into. Because these men left a more substantial trail in the archival records, I am

often able to find relevant details of their lives and situate the apprentices within wider family and

community contexts. I can even trace the networks connecting masters and magistrates.

I have organized the narratives in chapters that follow life stages of poor apprentices. The

narratives in “Family Disasters” highlight the misfortunes that brought children to official attention.

Those in “The Almshouse Community” highlight the Boston Almshouse, from which overseers

frequently plucked poor apprentices. Those in “Moving Out, Moving Up, Moving Down” highlight

economic disparities between master and apprentice. Those in “In the Master’s House” highlight the

master-child relationship. Those in “Life after Apprenticeship” highlight adulthood. Collectively, these

narratives show how children of misfortune, having circulated from one household to another by official

order, emerged as adults expected to behave in ways that officials approved. These children were not

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powerful and important in their day, but they remind us that they too are part of “we the people.”

I began “Children of Misfortune” in 2006-07, with an NEH residential fellowship at the

Massachusetts Historical Society. I documented all extant Boston poor apprenticeship indentures,

analyzed the apprentice system and the office of overseer of the poor, constructed a profile of overseers

during the study period, and began reconstructing the lives of individual children. Since then, I have

continued to piece together the individual narratives and trace the webs connecting Boston overseers of

the poor, the Boston Almshouse, apprentice masters, and parents of poor children. In 2010-11 I wrote an

article that focused on Almshouse women, many of whom lost their children to poor apprenticeship; the

article subsequently won the best article prize for 2012 in the Journal of the Early Republic. In fall 2011,

an internal fellowship at BGSU enabled me make significant progress tracing the poor children’s lives. In

June 2013, a fellowship at the Huntington Library enabled me to analyze how poor apprenticeship

developed as a legal institution by scrutinizing the changing laws and commentary on poor apprenticeship

in justice of the peace manuals published during the study period. In July and August 2013, supported by

a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, I did field research in New England,

examining town records for evidence of the children as they left poor apprenticeship and entered

independent adulthood. The trail often led me in unexpected directions, to other towns, and to other

states. As I saw how intensively poor children, masters, and overseers were linked together by family and

community networks, I realized I needed more time to trace the networks. I want to spend my upcoming

sabbatical year (2014-15) finishing this project: completing the research on the most elusive children;

placing each story in its proper social, economic, religious, and legal context; and writing the narratives.

An ACLS fellowship would enable me to devote the entire year (rather than just one semester) to the

project. The manuscript has been solicited by Cornell University Press, and I have stayed in touch with

editor Michael McGandy as it progresses. With a year to research and write, I am confident I will submit

the completed manuscript in spring 2015.

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Examples of primary documents used in this project:

Almshouse register showing second admission and binding of Thomas Furrs in May 1799, “Alphabetical List of Admissions, 1795-1817,” Boston Overseer of the Poor Records Mss Collection, Box 11, Folder 1, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Letter from Thomas Greenough to Boston overseers of the poor, requesting copy of his indenture, September 8, 1788, “Indentures of Poor Children Bound out as Apprentices by the Overseers of the Poor of the Town of Boston,” 5:100, Boston Public Library Rare Book Division.

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Indenture of Mary McNamara, June 3, 1747, “Indentures of Poor Children Bound out as Apprentices by the Overseers of the Poor of the Town of Boston,” 1:119, Boston Public Library Rare Book Division.

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Bibliography of Key Primary Sources:

“Boston Town Records,” Manuscript Collection, Boston Public Library, Rare Book Division.

“Boston Overseer of the Poor Records,” Manuscript Collection, Boston Public Library, Rare Book Division.

“Indentures of Poor Children Bound out as Apprentices by the Overseers of the Poor of the Town of Boston [1734-1805],” Manuscript Collection, Boston Public Library Rare Book Division.

Eric G. Nellis and Anne Decker Cecere, eds., The Eighteenth Century Records of the Boston Overseers of the Poor (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2008).

“Records of the Boston Overseers of the Poor, 1733-1925,” manuscript and microfilm collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Reports of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, multiple volumes [transcriptions of the early Boston town meeting and selectmen meeting records] (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1877- )

Bibliography of Key Secondary Sources:

Richard D. Brown and Jack Tager, Massachusetts: A Concise History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

Jacqueline Barbara Carr, After the Siege: A Social History of Boston, 1775-1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2005).

Philip J. Greven and James Marten, eds., Children in Colonial America (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

C. Dallett Hemphill, Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

James A. Henretta, “Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly 22:1 (1965): 75-92.

Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

Benjamin J. Klebaner, “Pauper Auctions: The ‘New England Method’ of Poor Relief,” The Essex Institute Historical Collections 91:3 (1955):195-210.

Allan Kulikoff, “The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly 28:3 (Juloy 1971): 375-412.

Barry Levy, “Girls and Boys: Poor Children and the Labor Market in Colonial New England,” Pennsylvania History 64 (Summer 1997), 287-307.

Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from its Founding to the Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

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Gloria L. Main, “Rocking the Cradle: Downsizing the New England Family,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37:1 (2006): 35-58.

Marla Miller, Rebecca Dickinson: Independence for a New England Woman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013).

W. Graham Millar, “The Poor Apprentices of Boston: Indentures of Poor Children Bound Out by the Overseers of the Poor of Boston, 1734-1776” (M.A. Thesis, College of William and Mary, 1958).

Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946).

Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).

Eric G. Nellis, “Misreading the Signs: Industrial Imitation, Poverty, and the Social Order in Colonial Boston,” The New England Quarterly 59:4 (1986): 486-507.

Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987).

Lawrence William Towner, “A Good Master Well Served: A Social History of Servitude in Massachusetts, 1620-1750” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1955), reprinted as A Good Master Well Served: Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620-1750 (New York: Garland Press, 1998).

Lawrence William Towner, “The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices, 1734-1805,” Past Imperfect: Essays on History, Libraries, and the Humanities,” ed. Robert W. Karrow and Alfred F. Young (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 36-55.

Mark Valeri, Heavenly Mechandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Peter R. Virgadamo, “Charity for a City in Crisis: Boston, 1740-1775,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 10:1 (1982): 22-33.

Helene M. Wall, Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

Lisa Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Conrad Edick Wright, ed., Massachusetts and the New Nation (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1992).

Alfred F. Young, “George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 38:4 (1981): 562-623.

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Publications List:

Books

Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2009). 253pp. Anthology of essays co-edited with John E. Murray, Department of Economics, University of Toledo.

Co-authored with John E. Murray: “‘A Proper and Instruction Education’: Raising Children in Pauper Apprenticeship,” 3-18 (Chapter 1);

Co-authored with Steve Hindle: “Recreating Proper Families in England and North America: Pauper Apprenticeship in Transatlantic Context,” 19-36 (Chapter 2)

Sole author: “‘Proper’ Magistrates and Masters: Binding out Poor Children in Southern New England, 1720-1820,” 39-51 (Chapter 3).

Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 235pp. Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2002.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters (refereed)

“Childhood,” in Oxford Bibliographies on Line: Atlantic History, ed. Trevor Burnard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/.

“Mapping the Boston Poor: Inmates of the Boston Almshouse, 1795-1801,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44:1 (Summer 2013), 63-83. Co-authored with Amilcar E. Challu, BGSU.

“Poor Women and the Boston Almshouse in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 32:3 (Fall 2012), 349-81. Winner of the Ralph D. Gray prize for best article in 2012 by the Society for Historians of the Early Republic.

“Pauper Apprenticeship in Narragansett Country: A Different Name for Slavery in Early New England,” Slavery/Anti-Slavery in New England (2003 Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife), ed. Peter Benes (Boston University Scholarly Publications, 2005), 56-70. Co-authored with Ella Wilcox Sekatau, The Narragansett Tribe.

“Colonial Period through the Early Republic” (overview essay), Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy, eds. Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor (ABC-CLIO, 2004), 1-8.

“‘Who died an expence to this town’: Poor Relief in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 135-62.

“Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Early Rhode Island,” Reinterpreting New England Indian History and the Colonial Experience, eds. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 137-73. Co-authored with Ella Wilcox Sekatau, The Narragansett Tribe.

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“Markets for Children in Early America: A Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship,” Journal of Economic History 62:2 (June 2002), 356-82. Co-authored with John E. Murray, Department of Economics, The University of Toledo. Winner of the best article prize for 2003 from the Program in Early American Economy and Society.

“Women as Symbols of Disorder in Early Rhode Island,” Women and the Colonial Gaze, eds. Tamara L. Hunt and Micheline R. Lessard (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 79-90.

“Racialisation and feminisation of poverty in early America: Indian women as poor of the town in eighteenth-century Rhode Island,” Empire and others: British encounters with indigenous peoples, 1600-1850, eds. R. Halpern and M.J. Daunton (London: University College London Press, 1999), 186-203.

“The Right to a Name: Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” Ethnohistory 44:3 (Summer 1997), 433-62. Co-authored with Ella Wilcox Sekatau, The Narragansett Tribe. Reprinted as chapter in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 114-43. Reprinted as chapter in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers From European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, eds. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 426-51. Reprinted as selection in Major Problems in American Indian History, 2nd ed., eds. Albert L. Hurtado and Peter Iverson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 182-97. Winner of the 1998 Heizer Prize from the American Society for Ethnohistory.

“Women of ‘no particular home’: Town Leaders and Female Transients in Rhode Island, 1750-1800,” Women and Freedom in Early America, ed. Larry D. Eldridge (New York University Press, 1997), 269-89.

“Literacy among New England’s Transient Poor, 1750-1800,” Research Note, Journal of Social History, 29:4 (Summer 1996), 963-65.

“The Domestic Cost of Seafaring: Town Leaders and Seamen’s Families in Rhode Island, 1750-1800,” Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, eds. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55-69.

“‘Breachy’ Sheep and Mad Dogs: Troublesome Domestic Animals in Rhode Island, 1750-1800,” New England’s Creatures, 1400-1900, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife for 1993 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1995), 61-72.